From: Xavier Noria <fxn@...>
Date: 2007-01-02T03:44:37+09:00
Subject: Re: OS-Specific "\n" Interpolation?

On Jan 1, 2007, at 7:20 PM, Rob Muhlestein wrote:

> Coming from Perl and C I have come to expect "\n" to be translated
> differently depending on OS--especially when doing sockets protocol
> programming.  Ruby *appears* to be subject to this same OS/clib
> translation issue which is so often overlooked. Was hoping Ruby
> shielded the average user from this. Has anyone else had any  
> experience
> confirming or denying this? I've written up the details in a blog  
> post:
>
> http://rob.muhlestein.net/2007/01/watch-those-newlines-ruby-no- 
> different.html

In Ruby "\n" is a string of lentght 1 in all systems, and it is equal  
to "\012" in all platforms. This works as in Perl and other languages  
that inherit from C the way newlines are handled[*], except it is  
simpler because it does not have the MacPerl exception.

In these languages you write portable sockets programming by  
binmodeing the socket and hard-coding "\015\012" or whatever.

As a side note, by default modern Perl performs newlines transaltion  
on CRLF platforms via the custom PerlIO I/O layer, the C Ruby  
interpreter delegates this to stdio.

-- fxn

[*]  http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2006/08/17/understanding- 
newlines.html